Another Voice | 6 June 2009

We call it ‘antiquity’. And yet, in this imperial Roman city, it seemed like yesterday

Call to mind London’s Regent Street. Suppose it straight, not curved. Suppose it about the same width but more than twice as long: a mile and a quarter. Picture it lined on each side not with shop fronts but with richly carved marble columns, more than 2,000 of them, approaching the height of Regent Street’s roof line. Top those columns with supporting massive, decorated stone lintels laid across. Picture the street paved not with tarmac but with stone slabs rutted with the grooves of a million cart and carriage wheels. Imagine it as the Champs Elysées of an imperial Roman city. Now place it on a high, stony, plateau in Syria, overlooking the wide valley and rich farmland of the Orontes river. Call it Apamea.

It existed. It still does. Much of it is there today, standing alone in the middle of bare fields in open country, hardly observed, some of its columns fallen in earthquakes, hundreds of them (I counted 606) upright. Surely this is a wonder of the world! Where are the tourist buses? Where are the guards?

But there are no perimeter fences, no entrance gates, no hordes of tourists, no armies of caretakers: nothing but a little warden’s hut at one end.

To walk, as I did last month, down Apamea’s great Roman boulevard, unsupervised in the warm glare of a Syrian afternoon and alone apart from two friends and a little boy trying to sell me some Roman coins, was remarkable. The emptiness, the silence, the absence of anything or anyone intruding from our own age, made it easier to recreate in the imagination the bustle and noise of a Roman street.